Stuff You Should Know - How the Antikythera Mechanism Works

Episode Date: December 15, 2015

In 1900 sponge divers found the wreck of a 2000 year-old treasure ship that contained within it a machine that should not exist. Learn of the device that reveals an understanding of the cosmos far more sophisticated than anyone knew the Greeks possessed. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.

I guess, indeed. You know, archaeology was the first word, first big word I could spell, early. I was like two weeks old. And you're spelling archaeology. Yeah, couldn't spell anything else for years and years, but I could spell archaeology. I love archaeology.

Yeah, me too. It's one of my favorite things, actually. Me too. Although I didn't list that when I was asked what my favorite things were in that one, Listener Mail. Still, it's up there, but you too, huh? Oh, yeah. Starting with, well, starting with Indiana Jones.

Yeah, that definitely helps that we were alive at the right age when those came out. Oh, yeah. Well, Chuck, there's a ship. It's an unnamed ship, as far as I know, that went down in the G&C off the coast of a tiny, teeny little spit of land called Antikythera in Greece, in between Crete and the Greek mainland, I believe.

And in 1901 or 1900, it was discovered, and it actually ended up giving birth to the field of marine archaeology, actually. It was the first shipwreck that was ever excavated archaeologically. Yeah, I think I read an article on that way back in the day. Underwater archaeology? Yeah.

It's very tricky. I would imagine so. Because most of the stuff you find is falling apart. Like, the second you take it out of water, it starts falling apart. Right. So they've gotten really good now, and I imagine they were not as good about it in 1900,

about bringing stuff up still in water. Yeah. And transporting it in water. Makes sense. In that same seawater. Display it in water? To, well, no, then they start poking around. Underwater.

In, yeah, in a lab under water, yeah. With the water. It's pretty sensible. Sure. I could have come up with that, I think. With that method? Yeah. Good for you.

Well, so OK. Anyway, this shipwreck that was discovered in 1900 was discovered actually by accident, right? Yeah, there were some sponge divers. You know, sponge diving, it's a big deal. Apparently it wasn't Greece. It was. That's where you had to get sponges back in the day.

It's in the ocean. And they were these sponge divers who, they actually got blown off course by a bad storm and ended up in that lovely part of town. And they said, boy, this is great. Let's just dive here. One guy dove down, came back up. And they weren't freediving at this point.

They actually had, you can listen to our, well, it wasn't a diving bell, but underwater breathing apparatuses at this point. Right. He came back and he's like, oh my god, there's dead horses and dead men everywhere. Yeah. And the boss is like, I don't know about that.

Let me go dive down there. He dives down and comes up with a bronze hand and says, you big dummy. Did he smack the guy over the head with it? It's a statue. And a bunch of statues down there decomposing. And then he went, wait, why are there a bunch of statues down there?

And they said, well, let's figure out, let's remember where the spot is and we'll just head off to North Africa and do our sponge diving like we were going to initially. Yeah, they started to make some dough. Right. But when they came back, they took the bronze arm and the location of the ship to the Greek government.

And the Greek government said, you know what? This could be a big deal. We have a lot of antiquities out there under the sea. And this might be some sort of treasure trove. So they hired these sponge divers to go back and excavate this place. And they found some pretty amazing stuff. In addition to the bronze arm, they

found all sorts of marble statues. They found a bronze statue of a young athlete. I think it was like six feet tall, a little bigger than life, is what they call it. They found a bust of a cynic, a philosopher, a very detailed, lifelike bust. It's really neat. And that was the guy whose arm.

That was his arm. Oh, it was his arm? Yeah. OK. And they found all manner of stuff, some really cool stuff. And brought it up. And they displayed it in the museum. And among this trove, there was a greatly overlooked item,

item number 15087. And it was this weird kind of, it looked almost like a kind of a clock face in a wooden frame. And no one knew what it was. And compared to the amazing art that had been brought up, it looked like a pile of garbage, basically. So they just filed it away. And it languished for a while until it was kind of rediscovered

again. Yeah. And giving credit where credit is due, the sponge team captain. I think that's what they call themselves. He was captain. Sponge team? Yeah, sponge team. Captain Demetrius Contos.

And then the crybaby who dove down there and thought he saw dead people was Elias Stadiatus. And if there's one thing I love, it's Greek names. Yeah. Love the names. Do you like those as much as archaeology? Greek archaeologists, you're pretty much flying in the upper atmosphere for me.

So those were the dudes that led the sponge team. And all those antiquities, they're scattered about a little bit. But most of them are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. And also some in Switzerland, oddly enough. And then some more in a different museum of underwater antiquities in Greece. And the reason the Greeks went to this trouble

and didn't just say, pfft, whatever, who cares about a bronze arm? Apparently, they'd been defeated recently by the Ottoman Turks within the last few years. And we're looking for a way to restore some national pride. And what better way to restore national pride than raising 2,000-year-old statues of your ancient gods that were made by your predecessors?

Yeah, and not only statues, but lamps, and bowls, and utensils, and tools, and just all sorts of stuff. It was a treasure trove. Yeah, so this site still is basically intact. The shipwreck is over a couple of, I think, about a 300-foot span about the length of a football field. And there's actually, for a long time, they thought it was two ships.

But they think, actually, no, it was an enormous, massive ship that broke into two. And they've only just found the front. They found the cabin. They haven't even found the hold. And that it was a huge grain ship that had been converted to basically a treasure ship that was taking Greek antiquities to Rome around 60 BCE.

And it sunk. So there's all these treasures that they haven't even found yet. They dove on it in 1901. Jacques Cousteau hit it up in 1950, and then again in 1976. And now there's the most sophisticated dives that are being taken on it.

Team Zisu was on it. Yes, he's on it. As of 2014, there's an international team that includes some people from Woods Hole Geographic Institute, or Oceanographic Institute, who are really starting to figure this out. Yeah, and one of the reasons they're still doing this is because, like you said, it's just a great find,

no matter what. But the other reason is because item number 15087, AKA the, how does that pronounce again? Anacathera. Anacathera mechanism is one of the most mysterious finds ever, because nobody knows who made it. And until recently, no one knew exactly what it was. But now they've pretty much figured it out.

Yeah, well, so when they first brought it up in 1901, again, it just looked like some weird kind of, kind of like a clock, but it was in a wooden frame. As the wooden frame was exposed to the air, it split. Yeah. And the stuff inside fell apart. And when it fell apart, one of the directors of the museum, I believe, Spiriton Stais.

Another great name. He looked inside and realized that these are all, like, actually different bronze parts, and they have inscriptions. And they appear to be geared teeth. Yeah, like precision gears. Right. But he said that's impossible, because that technology didn't come along for well over 1,000 years later.

Yes. 1,000 plus, like maybe 1,400 to 2,000 years later. Right. So it pops up in the West about the 14th century in Europe. So yeah, like you say, it's totally impossible that this could be what he's looking at. Yeah, not 50 or 100 years. So some people said, this thing probably accidentally was

dropped over this wreck site, and just happened to nestle in and make it seem like it was part of this ancient shipwreck. Nope. No, it was found underneath other debris in the shipwreck. So that's virtually impossible. But it was so confounding, and it's so completely undermined our understanding at the time of technology like that, and just the understanding of that kind of precision engineering

that it was just set aside. Like no one knows what this is. Let's just pretend it doesn't exist. Yeah, and that happened until about the 1950s. And we'll take a little break here, and we'll get back to what happened in the 1950s right after this. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

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All right. So it's 1950s. Everyone's drunk at lunch. Smoking cigarette, throwing trash out of their window. And there's an impossible machine rotting away in a museum in Greece. That's right. And that's when a man named Derek DeSolo price.

And you know what? This thing is pretty neat. And I think I'm going to make this my new obsession. So he spent years researching this thing, and basically said, I think it's some sort of weird. He said computer. He meant well. He didn't mean computer, because it can't be a computer,

obviously. It's not programmable. No. So it can't be a computer. But it's, I mean, that word's not terribly far off. Yeah, it's not a computer. So he's using the wrong word there. But along with Dr. C, man, another great Greek name,

Thomas Kara Callos. He's a radiographer. He said, let's take some x-rays of this thing. In 1974, he published his findings in Gears from the Greeks, which he thought was going to light the world on fire. But it turns out people were a little scared to say, yeah, this thing predates these kind of precision gears

by well over 1,000 years. So let's rethink everything we know about this kind of technology. Everyone, no one wanted to touch it with a 10 foot pole is what I gathered. No. So it's kind of ignored. At the time, the people who were studying ancient Greece

were studying their written documents, right? They weren't studying artifacts, like physical relics or anything like that. And they certainly weren't really up on the ancient Greek technology. And so, yeah, he wrote this book and just expected it to change the world because he really had approached it from a very scientific standpoint

when they finally released his book in the 70s. Yeah, his theory on what it was was correct. Yeah, he theorized that it was a, I'm going to use the word computer, all right, a mechanism. Yeah, that's what it is. It was a mechanism with, at one point, up to 72 different precise gears, tooth gears that all interacted with one another

to track the movement of the celestial bodies. The five planets that were visible to the naked eye, the sun, the moon, it tracked eclipses, solar, and lunar. And it also, it tracked the Olympic games just as an added bonus. Well, if you're going to have an astronomical calculator, you might as well throw in a sports calendar. Yeah, you know, might as well.

And so the whole thing, again, this thing should not have existed. Like, it wasn't for another 1,400, 1,300 years before anything like this appeared in the West. So it shouldn't have been, which is another reason why a lot of people weren't like, yes, this is a great book, Gears from the Greeks. It changed everything.

They were like, you're totally full of it. And this poor guy, Price, was not helped at all by a guy named Eric von Daniken, right? Yeah, he wrote a book in 1968 called Chariots of the Gods. And in that, he proposed that there are aliens who have been bringing us technological gifts to Earth, and this is one of them. And everyone, this was a really popular book.

So he got all the headlines with just a completely fabricated story. Yeah, it was like, it was the birth of the interest in ufology and the Bermuda Triangle, the Nazkelyns, or landing strips, that kind of stuff, right? That's right. So when this guy came along and put his stamp of nuttiness, I guess, certainly interesting, that whole Time Life Mysteries

series definitely came out of this von Daniken's work kind of thing, but it had nothing to do with any kind of academia or scholarliness, right? That's right. So he really helped put the kibosh on Price's work, this Gears from the Greeks, and it languished for a while. For another couple of decades, I believe, right? Yeah, that's right.

It wasn't until the mid-2000s that they decided, you know what? We have this great technology now called CT scanning. Computed tomography. And what we can do with this stuff, we can actually get inside this thing. And there are videos of this actually being done on the mechanism. It's really cool looking.

You can watch it unfold in real time. And they basically figured out from the inside out how this thing worked and how it operated. Yeah. And it is as follows. There's a picture like a wooden box. OK, about the size of a shoe box, right? Yeah, it looks bigger to me.

But I guess some. I saw someone else describe it like a thick laptop size. Oh, OK. Again, with the computers, people just can't stop. It's a computer, an ancient computer. On one side of the box, if it's standing like a shoe box on end, on one side, there's a crank, like just a small dial with a little handle that would use to crank this thing up.

The handle's missing now, by the way. This is what you're describing is what it looked like originally, right? Oh, yeah. Now it's just disintegrated blobs and chunks of things. Yeah. Yeah. So the knob on the side is what wound it forward and backward.

And then you had a big front side and a back side. All the gears are in the middle contained therein. Yes. And again, these are gears with teeth between 15 and 223 of them on a gear. And all of them, the number of teeth that they have, has to do with their relationship to the other gears they interact with.

That's right. So they have all these different hands. If you wound it up, it would engage these gears. Each of the hands moves at a separate pace and represents what you said earlier, the five planets and Earth and the moon. Basically, sun and moon. Basically, anything we could see from Earth at this point.

Right. And these are the gears inside. And the gears are physically representing how, say, the sun and the moon interact. Yeah. Well, now these are the hands. Right. But then they're driving the hands.

And the hands have a representation in the form of a colored orb on the face of the actual mechanism, the machine. Exactly. So on the backside, you've got two more dial systems. One is a calendar of the lunar and solar eclipse. And another one, basically, like you said, was the sports calendar.

Right. The Olympics are coming up. Then four years after that, there'll be more Olympics. Yes. So four years. So on the front, it was attract the day, right? That was the big front face of it. I believe it did.

OK. And then on the back, when it's tracking eclipses, so, Chuck, when you make a clock, the whole purpose of a clock is so any guy can come along and be like, oh, it's this day, right? So you want your clock to be accurate. The problem is, if you're tracking just the solar calendar, or you're tracking just the movement of the moon,

your clock is going to, or your calendar, is eventually going to fall out of sync. And all of a sudden, something like one of the solstices, your summer solstice is going to show up in December after 18 years, right? So to do that, and this has been one of the big things that clockmakers and calendar makers have had to deal with for ever, you have to figure out how to reconcile the movement

of the sun and the moon with your calendar so that it stays up to date, literally. Like mechanically up to date. Mechanically, but also mathematically, right? So several great thinkers figured out that if you take the tracking of the moon and extrapolate it by enough times, it will eventually sync up years down the line

with the solar calendar, I think, over the course of like 19 years. And this is what's called the metonic cycle, right? There's like 534 phases of the moon in one 19-year period. And if you can track that, then you can keep your calendar in sync. This is the level of sophistication that the Antikythera mechanism operates on.

To this point, we did not realize that the ancient Greeks had this level of understanding of astronomy. Yeah, it was a big find for a lot of reasons, and that's one of them for sure. Yeah, and one of the reasons that we know that they knew this, and we're not just kind of putting our own ideas onto it, is when they used that computer tomography,

they found inscriptions on all these different gears, which basically said how they work and what they track, which is another reason this find was so amazing. It basically had an instruction manual engraved on it. That's right. And we will talk more about that right after this. Yeah, yeah, you know, stop, but stop, you shouldn't know. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound

like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there

for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, so you're talking about the inscriptions. Like you said, it was a user's guide. Yeah. If there's going to be a sophisticated piece of equipment like this computer, it's going to come with a book that says, here's how you use it. So the finding, I mean, they're doing a pretty good job of discovering the stuff on their own, but then finding

the user's guide and piecing that together became even a bigger part of the puzzle. It did. And then that user guide also, too, if you're an anthropologist from 500 years in the future and you happen upon a user guide to a Mac or something, right? Yeah. It also describes the level of technology

that the people who built this computer had. Like in writing, it says, this is what we know. This is what we understand. So again, this backdated the understanding of astronomy among the Greeks far earlier than we'd ever given them credit for. And it confirmed a lot of stuff that had been thrown out over the years as flights of fancy or imagination

by writers who incited this kind of understanding of the people of their time. And later historians were like, these people were just making up, and it was a lucky guess. This mechanism has helped show, no, these guys actually knew what they were talking about. Yeah, one of those was a belief, well, by some, but not held by others, that ancient Greeks had calendars where they

excluded certain days to adjust the links of the months. Right. A lot of people were like, no, no, no, there's no way that they were that sophisticated. This machine, basically, and the accompanying guidebook proved it to be true, which is pretty great. It is. And because of its sophistication,

there are a list of people from that time that they think may have had a hand in this. Yeah. Of course, Archimedes, he's going to be in there any time something special is found. Yeah, and there's actually writing about Archimedes creating a sphere, a three-dimensional model that actually doesn't really sound like the anti-Cathara

mechanism. No, but he'll be on any list if you find something that like any mechanism is sophisticated. Hipparchus, who I think, I don't know if we talked about him yet or not, he's a mathematician and astronomer. And I think the time period worked out for him. So he could have been one of the people involved. My money's on him.

You think? Yeah, or his student Poseidonus. Oh, OK. Was that Poseidonus? Yeah. I like Poseidonus. I'm sure he did, too, because that makes him sound like a Greek god.

Yeah. There are also some other hints, you know, trying to piece together the mystery. One of the inscriptions refers to an athletic event in Rhodes. Which is where Hipparchus taught where his school was. Yeah, and there's a man named Alexander Jones. He's a specialist at NYU. And that's what he said, my money's on Rhodes, is that

that's where this thing came from. Yeah. Hipparchus. Yeah. Maybe Poseidonus. The other thing that helps is, well, it doesn't help necessarily Hipparchus's case. But it kind of excludes Archimedes.

Some researchers looked at old Babylonian records of eclipses and tried to sync this thing up. And apparently, they were able to exclude hundreds of different possibilities and settled on 205 BCE being the start date for the mechanism. Yeah, I think it was a little older than they originally thought, right? Yeah, they were thinking 50 to 100 BCE.

And they're like, no, 205 is probably the date that this thing was intended to be set to. Because again, this thing's tracking the movements of the bodies in the heavens based on the movement of the sun and moon, and how do you track that by tracking eclipses? So you would want to set it to an eclipse because there has to be some starting point to set it to, right? Sure.

So they figured it was 205. Well, Archimedes, as you remember, we did a whole episode on him. We did some on the death ray, maybe? Yes. He was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 because he wouldn't pay attention to the soldier who was telling him to pay attention, I think.

But he was killed in 212. So that probably excludes him, because he was so smart. He knew that an eclipse was coming in seven years and wanted his mechanism to start then. He was so broke he couldn't pay attention. Can we hear that one? No. This is my first time.

What, hearing that joke? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Those are good in the burn contest or whatever. Sure. What do they call it? Your mama jokes? Yeah.

Yeah. Kids. It's a good one, though. What else you got here? Did not think that was going to make an appearance in this episode. Well, since then, there have been 10 models, at least 10, that have been built recreating this thing.

There was a watchmaker that got into it. And of course, the way this thing's put together, it seems like a watch and clockmaker would be an ideal candidate. You blow made one. Well, they made three of this watch. And it's like a watch version of it. That's pretty amazing.

It's pretty cool. I wonder how much they went for those three. Oh, I'm sure they were pretty cheap. Somebody made one out of Legos. Yeah. Was it a Lego set, or was it just someone made a Lego model? Oh, they made a Lego model. It was like an Apple engineer.

I didn't know. I thought it might have been a Lego set, a very obscure Lego set. Not yet. I'll bet, though, that the engineer's like, I'll sell you these plants, Lego, if you want them. Old Kirk. There's one thing that it's amazing when you're like,

wow, this knowledge is even older than we thought. And a lot of people point out that in the West, yes, it took until the 14th century for this knowledge to come about. We likely got it from Muslims, Muslim scholars. But it's possible that it came to the West via Muslim scholars from the Greeks. So this knowledge was around.

The Muslims that were interacting with the Greeks gained this knowledge. And they had it themselves until they finally interacted with us in the West in the 14th century. It's pretty amazing. But other people are like, yeah, that's great. Why didn't the Greeks build on this? If they had this sophisticated and understanding of how to

track time and the movement of the heavenly bodies, why did they stop there? Well, they may not have. They did. That's the thing. Well, no, I mean, until we find the next thing that was right 300 or 400 years after that that we previously didn't know about.

No, the point is, why didn't they build stuff that survived and came down to this day? And they didn't. Like, there's, incontrovertibly, they did not build on it, or else we would have it today. And Arthur C. Clarke is saying, if they had built on this level of sophistication and it had continued uninterrupted, today we'd be traveling amongst the stars by now, after 2,000

years of having this knowledge. Yeah, I don't see how anyone can say that, though. How can he say that they'll never find another mechanism after this that built on this? You won't. What I'm saying is that knowledge wasn't built on and built on and built on and built on uninterrupted. Oh, so they may have built on it.

They could have. But from what we understand, they actually didn't. My money's on finding something else that makes a little more sense out of this. Well, they did find something else. In 1983, a man in Beirut was in a bazaar and found some weird geared mechanism. And they figured out that it was a sixth century CE

calendar, like a geared calendar. It's the second oldest geared mechanism known to humankind for now, after the Antikythera mechanism. We may find an entire civilization underwater. With all our binks, no, but you never know. You never know. You never know. I'm sure before they found this, they

were saying that they were never advanced enough to make something like this. Yeah, the point is that they weren't advanced enough. The point is they didn't build on this advancement. Until we find out that they have. Right. Well, whatever came in and broke that building on it and interrupted it, that sucks.

Because we could be far more advanced than we are. Yeah, it could have been a volcano that covered a laboratory in ash that sunk underwater. And that's where the underwater civilization's been. Yeah, you never know. In the lab. If you want to know more about the Antikythera mechanism, you just try your hand at spelling that.

It's fun to say, isn't it? Yeah, and it's easy to spell if you sound about. And do that in the search bar at House of Fortunes, since they said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Miaculpa. Hey, guys, I absolutely love stuff you should know and have listened to every episode, many more than once.

You keep me company on many along commute. While I was listening to the Voynich manuscript podcast, which was awesome, I noticed Chuck said a possible explanation was mental illness. Josh said yes, like an autistic monk. I'm sure you know this, but autism is a developmental disorder, not a mental illness. Behavioral therapists who work with autistic children,

it makes me very sensitive to these matters. Thanks for your great work. My favorite ever was Berlin Wall. And that is from Trisha Flowers. And I think her subject line was, I still love you guys. So we gotten quite a lot of feedback on this. And I'll let you take it away. It was a mistake.

Yeah, it was totally misspoke. Yeah. I don't think that autism is a form of mental illness. What I should have said and meant to say was or an autistic monk. Right. Or a monk with autism, I think, is the proper way to put it. Yeah.

So not like. Yeah. Sometimes in the heat of the moment. Sure. Like or as. But yes, no, I don't think that those two are the same. Yeah. So all apologies, people.

We certainly don't think that. And I always want to correct ourselves. So we appreciate you. Yeah, especially when something we say accidentally causes distress among people. There's no reason to let that stand agreed. Yeah. Yeah.

So thank you, Trisha. We appreciate you writing in to let us, well, set us straight. Call us out, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, in a very nice way. Yes. And if you want to set us straight or say whatever, you can get in touch with us via S-Y-S-K podcast on Twitter.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. You can hang out with us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.